I’m not well and insecurities I’ve felt side hustling
By: Julia Nguyen
Side hustling is really just hustling, and it’s a lonely battle with self-esteem on social media
Content warning: obsessive-compulsive disorder, medication and alcohol abuse, self-harm, and depression
I started writing this post a month ago, and couldn’t finish it because I didn’t feel like it was authentic enough. It was originally about insecurities I’ve felt side hustling and how I overcame them. I haven’t overcome them though.
These past two years have been the most difficult yet, and not only because of a lot of new life changes — graduating from university, moving to a new country, and facing a long series of unfortunate events. I’ve been facing an ongoing saga which I cannot legally talk about that’s not ending anytime soon.
After a few years of living in San Francisco (as an intern and full-time employee) and getting very involved in its tech community, I have come to the realization that I don’t have a real support system here.
I feel invisible to the people the around me. It feels like I’m only worth interacting with for my work — whether it’s technical, community organizing, or mental health activism. Yet at the same time, I don’t feel like I get enough appreciation for it.
The few real friends I have aren’t always there for me for various reasons. Most are busy and wrapped up in their own problems understandably. Others just interact with me to get my support, but don’t reciprocate back.
It feels like I’m being used, but not in a malicious way. We’re just inherently selfish as humans. We can turn our backs on one another even when it’s clear someone is going through a hard time and needs other humans.
I do have a therapist and I try my best to practice self-care. Honestly, I’m starting to get annoyed by the word self-care. I appreciate the gesture wholeheartedly, but it’s becoming a commodity or a buzzword. I’ll share my experiences with someone and they’ll simply reply with, “Have you practiced self-care?”. I’m not against self-care, I just hate how it’s become an easy way out to respond to someone in a crisis.
I can count the people who truly care about me on one hand. As someone who is open and authentic about mental illness and insecurities on social media (particularly Twitter), this bothered me for a while. It made me see myself as unpopular and not well-liked. I’m not a Twitter celebrity in the tech community who people want to hang out with or brag about knowing. I can also imagine the isolation and pressure felt by people who are well-known. Maybe there’s no winning for anyone.
That’s the problem. The hero worship that’s in the tech community (and everywhere overall). It feels like you need be part of a squad or to be social media BFFs with the famous people to be seen and heard. It’s a crowd I wanted to be a part of because it felt like the only way to have my work validated. I wanted people to see me as strong, badass, and woke. Tech Twitter has brought a lot of good in our industry, but it can feel like a competition to one-up each other in thought leadership.
My relationship with Twitter is a love-hate one. I started using it on an almost daily basis in 2014 when I started publicizing my diversity and inclusion work. Thanks to the tech community on there, I was able to find people to validate my experiences and work, and to me, that felt like having more friends.
In reality, that’s not the case. Don’t get me wrong, thanks to that community, I have met a few people I genuinely regard as friends. I’m also grateful for having a platform to share my work, network, and learn from people of different backgrounds than mine.
But it feels like your worth is measured by the number of followers, likes, and retweets you get from prominent people. There was definitely a side of me that wanted to become popular. It shaped and also damaged my self-esteem. I felt like I was just posting content to get any form of validation.
When I didn’t get the feedback I wanted, I would feel invisible and demoralized for days. I even tried to apply for Twitter verification once, and when it got rejected, it made me feel more insignificant.
I felt upset and disappointed in myself for giving into the superficiality of social media. Meeting up with people from Twitter has felt superficial too. Upon meeting, I would excitedly bond over shared experiences and interests and then never really hear from them again. Later I would bump into them at events and just talk about being in tech. These interactions made me feel empty and unwanted.
I’m well aware that you can’t be friends with everyone, but when you’re feeling isolated, to begin with, it feels more disappointing to lose potential friends. We are part of a culture where ghosting is the norm, and not just in online dating. We ghost each other even when someone is visibly going through difficult times, and that’s profoundly problematic. I’ve broken down in public places including work, and no one has reached out unless I’ve made it explicit that I’m going through a hard time. That itself is emotional labour.
This past year has become a ticking time bomb for me. I’m burnt out. I’m exhausted. I feel invisible. I feel erased. My mental illness, particularly my OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder), has gotten too unbearable too often. I’ve relapsed into medication and alcohol abuse, and other forms of self-harm.
While many of the things I worked so hard for worked out, for example: getting more contributors and users for if me, getting a promotion at work, speaking at conferences on just my technical work, and being financially stable and giving back to my family back home in Toronto who’ve sacrificed so much for me to succeed, my happiness and health have taken a huge hit. I was relying way too much on work, side hustles, and social media to support my self-esteem.
As a result, I’ve started to use social media less and care about it less. Frankly, it’s been so much healthier for me. The people who truly care about you will reach out to you. It hasn’t been a lot of people for me, but I try not to make those details matter. The people who care matter above everything else. They will check in with you, tell you that you matter to them, and do all they can to bring you out of dark places.
I tell these people about the things I’m proud of. I tell these people about the things I’m insecure about. I don’t need validation from anyone else. I don’t need to be seen as a hero to the masses to matter.
This was the original post I was trying to write. It’s unfinished, but I think everything I’ve said above really captures why I feel this way.
Whether you call it a passion project, side project, or side hustle, the work you pursue outside your day job can mean the world to you. For me, that hustle is if me. It’s a free, not-for-profit open source mental health communication app and community that I started four years ago as an undergraduate computer science student. The project has been a lifetime in the making as someone with various intersectional identities who struggles with OCD, depression, and anxiety.
Over the past four years with the help and support of so many wonderful people and organizations, I’ve worked incredibly hard to build if me, as both an app and open source community, into a platform where people can be their most authentic selves regardless of their background.
It’s been hard being taken seriously as a technical founder and leader in open source. People have assumed I don’t code when in reality I both code and manage people (the latter, in my opinion, is more difficult). A man once called my project “cute”. What’s so cute about empowering people to communicate about their mental health with loved ones? I could spend this entire post recounting microaggressions and harassment, but I won’t.
This post is about the insecurities I’ve felt side hustling and how my journey in improving my mental health is teaching me how to overcome them. To anyone who relates, I hope I help validate what you’re going through. Your work matters, and most importantly, you matter.
You tell someone excitedly about a side hustle success. They don’t react with any or much excitement. You feel unacknowledged and disappointed.
Someone mislabels or misdescribes your side hustle in a way that trivializes it. You feel erased and insulted.
You see someone who does a similar side hustle get praise. You feel jealous and erased.
You see awesome people being featured in lists of successful people. You feel unacknowledged.
You don’t get as many retweets, likes, or shares when you talk about your side hustle. You feel demoralized.
You lose followers when you talk about your side hustle often. You also feel demoralized.
You refrain from raising money for your side hustle (even though you need it) because you aren’t popular enough.
You wonder if someone more visible was working on your side hustle whether it would be more successful.
You feel burnt out promoting and working on your side hustle. You fear saying no to opportunities will you set back.
You’re worried that talking about your side hustle insecurities will take away from the hustle.
It can be hard to focus on the positive things when we are conditioned to be critical of our flaws, failures, and wrongdoings. As someone with OCD, it’s really hard for me to pull myself out this kind of spiral. I feel mentally and physically drained and trapped in negative thinking and unhealthy coping mechanisms.
I’ve been challenging myself to focus on the things that make me happy and to try new things that don’t hold my self-esteem on a single thread. Slowly but surely, I’ve been making art and music, sewing clothes, and running again. I’m trying out bouldering, rock climbing, and other new random hobbies. I’m doing all these things for myself and not to share on social media.
Stay awesome and strong folks. You can log off of social media if it’s truly making you unhappy. You matter no matter what. Reaching out for support is always an option. It may not be from a lot of people, but the people who do care are the only ones that matter. Everything else is noise.
It’s hard to resist the urge to share an attractive photo or a witty observation on social media and get that instant gratification. There’s also the fear of missing out (FoMO) that can suck. Don’t feel like a hypocrite for revisiting it, you do you. Just know that being present and active on social media doesn’t define you. You are worth so much more.
